April 29, 2016

LP: Free Cake for Every Creature - Talking Quietly of Anything With You

Free Cake for Every Creature's latest album is a mantra of adulthood acceptance.

When I first heard the entirety of Talking Quietly of Anything With You, I was alone in a drab airport seating area on a Tuesday night, soda stains marking my seat and clusters of men in outdated pinstriped suits discussing meetings and stocks. While quietly recovering from mistaking a bored college student for my brother, Katie Bennett’s familiar vocals drowned out the monotone murmurs around me – unapologetically youthful and clear, I found a momentary confidante in the fleeting, charmingly clumsy chords that characterize Free Cake for Every Creature’s latest release.

The word “authentic” is often tossed around to describe most modern day twee emulations; a lazy approach to expressing the way listeners’ hearts rhythmically beat alongside a certain song when a genuine connection is made. That being said, there’s really no other way of depicting the comfortable rush that surges when Bennett’s voice sweeps through your headphones. There’s a sense that this release was made for us: the girls who are “twenty-two years old, drawing chubby cows in (our) journal(s).” The girls who balance on that foggy space between teenage daydreams and the crisp reality of adulthood. The girls who have fallen in love once, maybe twice, who couldn’t really say what love is beyond writing “a shitty poem on the wall of a dressing room in J.C. Penny.”

Though Talking Quietly of Anything With You feels autobiographical at its core (as if we’re secretly shuffling through a diary Bennett accidentally left open on the kitchen counter), it’s impossible not to color the album with our own experiences. But this time, they’re tinged with the rosy glow along the lines Beat Happening or The Sundays could have produced. This is not a “coming-of-age” album, or an ode to the growing pains that dye our early twenties red. If anything, it’s a mantra of acceptance – of knowing that at any given moment we’re composed of multiple selves, and that’s okay. We can move from city to city, we can transform ourselves as many times as we like; because honestly, there’s really no such thing as having it all “figured out.”

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talking quietly of anything with you by free cake for every creatureListen to Free Cake for Every Creature on bandcamp.THIS STAFF POST WAS CONTRIBUTED BY:
Lauren Ball, an investigative journalism student based in Chicago, IL. She's excited to help derail the patriarchy and overturn capitalistic power structures, but is trying not to get too dramatic here. Check out her work in American Songwriter Magazine, Highlight Magazine, Esoteric Zine, and her poetry in Sobotka Literary Magazine.